


Player Piano

by leiascully



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-24
Updated: 2007-08-24
Packaged: 2017-10-03 05:21:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The music rolls over them, twines itself around them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Player Piano

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: AU  
> A/N: For [**betteronvicodin**](http://community.livejournal.com/betteronvicodin/) Prompt 99: House became a jazz pianist instead of a doctor. Many thanks to [**queenzulu**](http://queenzulu.livejournal.com/) for looking it over. Homage in the title to the late great Kurt Vonnegut, of course.   
> Disclaimer: _House M.D._ and all related characters are property of Heel and Toe Films, Shore Z Productions and Bad Hat Harry Productions in association with NBC Universal Television Studio. No profit is made and no infringement is intended.

The first time Cuddy goes to the bar it's on a date. A bad date, of course, but when he goes home to his girlfriend, she buys herself a drink and listens to the piano player. He plays at the perfect volume, loud enough to hear but quiet enough that conversations aren't screaming affairs; it takes the notes a moment to jumble through the smoke and booze and ambient noise, but when she tunes in, she's startled by how good he is. He's got a deft touch on the keys and though he's playing standards, they're never boring or entirely familiar. She shifts her chair closer.

She comes back on Friday night. The piano player's there, rangy and lean, crumbled and his face rough with stubble. She picks a table as close to the piano as is subtle and sits nursing a vodka and tonic. Once he looks up and catches her watching him. His eyes are so blue and fierce that she blushes and turns away, thinking of autumn. When she leaves, she has a drink sent up to him.

It becomes a routine, sliding into her seat, ordering a drink, and pretending she's not there for him, pretending she doesn't notice when he limps on his way to the toilets. But she's sure he knows, though she never hears him say a word to anyone. Now and again he'll play a song or just a fragment of melody and she'll hear it as clearly as a phone call, knowing it's for her ears in particular. Funny how it works, but she stops bringing dates to the bar after she hears a jangle of disapproval behind "Summertime" and Idiot Number 37 chides her for spacing out or talking about work.

It isn't love or even friendship, but there's a peculiar brand of intimacy to it, her and the piano player. He acts as if he knows her, the tension across his shoulders sometimes and the way he tucks a rare smile into the corner of his mouth when the waitress sets a scotch on the rocks on the piano top. That's all she needs. They have their odd conversations across the room, half a glance or a quick rill or the way a glass slides across a table. Sometimes she thinks about talking to him, finding out his name, riddling out the limp. She never will: he can't be as interesting as she wants him to be, and yet somehow it's still better than any of the dates she's had with safe, sane men who turn out to be dullards, cheaters, or idiots. She shrugs. Go with what works, she's learned. Her life may be bare and lonely by her mother's standards, but she can live with it. She's not going to settle for less than she deserves.

He plays her favorite song and she sighs.

\+ + + +

James Wilson shouldn't be going to bars. He's married, after all, and Bonnie expects him home, but these days he just can't drag himself back to his perfect house and his charming wife and his troublesome dog Roger. He always intends to go home, he just somehow doesn't make it. As if by accident, he'll find himself in a bar or a restaurant. He's not an alcoholic - it's only ever one drink, or maybe two if he's lost a patient, but it's more and more often. He tries hitting the gym first, so he'll be tired enough just to go home and make small talk at dinner with his wife, but after the sweat and the shower, it's a beer he wants. Somehow the thrill of his wife's body under his has faded; her jokes have faded; the way he liked to twist his fingers into her curls has faded. He doesn't like the thought of going home, where all of his books are thumbed and all of his sweatshirts are pilly on the inside. It used to be a comfort, the familiarity. Now it makes him itch under the skin, and the sting of Gold Bond doesn't ease the restlessness. He smells like his grandfather and he can't seem to escape.

So he goes to bars. A different bar every week, and then two bars a week, and then one night he sees the Dean sitting at a table. She's alone and she's gorgeous, nursing something red in a martini glass and gazing into space. So he goes over, telling himself he should go home, and she looks up and smiles.

"Doctor Wilson."

"Doctor Cuddy. This seat taken?"

"All yours," she says, and toys with the stirrer in her drink, her head cocked toward the piano player. He sips his drink and feels the slow burn of alcohol dissolve the itch.

"This is going to sound horrible," he says, "but do you come here often?"

"Now and again," she says, a distant smile curving her lips. In the low light of the bar, she's stunning. He wonders idly if she's loud in bed. She tips her head up, her fingers curling over her collarbone, and a flicker of amusement crosses her face. He follows the line of her sight: the piano player again. Wilson listens to the music for a minute. The guy's good. Really good. It's rough big-city jazz, not what he usually hears in Princeton bars. The guy has his eyes closed, but he's half-smiling. His expression and Cuddy's together would make a complete sketch of enjoyment. Wilson looks between them and surrenders his half-fantasy of the bare curve of Cuddy's hip. She isn't here for that; she's here for herself.

He should go home, but he knows he'll keep coming back. After all, the music's good.

\+ + + +

Robert Chase knows he ought to hate bars. After all those empty bottles in the trash and the reek of juniper on his bleary mother's breath, he ought to feel sick every time he steps over a shadowy threshold or sees a neon sign advertising some domestic swill. But this is life, not a movie, and he likes bars. He likes the looseness of his shoulders after a drink. He likes watching women laugh and flirt. He feels good that he's not one of the losers hunched over a brown bottle in the corner, that he could be flirting with the women if he wanted. NICU work is rewarding; he wouldn't want to be anywhere else, but the days are long, and the bar is an easy transition back into the world of adults after all those hours of agonizing over tiny little beings who communicate mostly through ear-splitting squalling.

He drops by this bar because it's close and he's never noticed it before. It's got the perfect bar atmosphere when he steps in: a little smoke, unpretentious lighting, good beer on tap, and the ebb and flow of jazz over the rumble of conversation. He orders a pint of porter and sips it slowly, glancing around. A woman laughs, an unexpectedly bold raspy chuckle, and catches his eye. He recognizes her after a moment: Doctor Cuddy, more at ease than he's ever seen her. He orders another pint and wanders over to her table, just to say hello.

"Doctor Chase!" It's Wilson, the head of oncology, and Chase almost backtracks. He hadn't noticed who Cuddy's companion actually was. "Have a seat."

"Is this the official bar of the Princeton-Plainsboro brass?" Chase jokes, trying not to think about how weird it is to be drinking with his boss' boss.

"Maybe if we endorsed them, they'd give us a cut of their profits," Cuddy says, and Chase isn't sure he's ever heard her be funny before. He risks a grin and she grins back.

"So why this bar?" he asks. "It's not quite on the doorstep."

"She likes the jazz man," Wilson says. "He appeals to her desperate need for culture that's not from a petri dish."

Chase leans back in his chair and actually looks at the guy for the first time. He's staring at the keys, but there's a kind of humorous awareness about him, as if he knows they're watching. The guy's the picture of a musician: scruffy jeans, stubble, and probably stoned out of his mind. Except that there's a precision to his playing that suggests a keen control through whatever haze he's created for himself, and when the guy looks up, he stares straight at Chase as if he knows what Chase was thinking and he's wryly entertained. Chase blinks, a little taken aback. He respects the guy, suddenly and without reservations.

\+ + + +

Allison Cameron is feeling outrageously lonely, and the other immunologists are pissing her off, and a hungover college kid threw up on her in the clinic earlier and the stink won't wash out even though she's wearing scrubs now, and all she wants to do is sit in a bar and drink a Budweiser and think about Joe and Brian and the chances she missed. Not that Budweiser would be her first choice, but she remembers game days and her boys on the couch with their Buds and their chips while she sat cozy between them. She's restless and unhappy and she's not watching where she's going, so when she rounds a corner and crashes into someone, it's not that much of a surprise. She sits on the cold tile floor and swears and thinks about crying. The guy she slammed into holds out a hand and pulls her up. She tries to smile her thanks, but it comes out all lopsided.

"Sorry," she says. "Little distracted."

"No problem," says the guy in an Aussie lilt. "You're one of the immunologists, right?"

"Allison Cameron."

"Robert Chase. NICU." He hesitates. "This may be a little forward, but I was headed to the bar. You look like you could use a drink. Can I buy you a beer?"

"That obvious?" She can feel her lip quivering.

"We all have those days," he says easily. "Come on. There's this fantastic piano player. You have to hear him to believe it. He's like a surgeon up there."

She's startled when they get to the bar. He leans over to talk to the girl like he's a regular; she smiles when she sees him, and flirts her eyes at him. Cameron looks around the room, taking it in. She hasn't been to a bar like this in a while; her few girlfriends usually drag her to the fancy bar, where three inch heels are almost dress code. This bar is shabbier, a down home sort of place, and she starts to relax. Her ass aches where she hit the floor, but at least the smell of cigarette smoke and beer chases away the memory of vomit. Chase comes over with his beer and hers and tilts his head to indicate a table near the piano. She follows along behind him and freezes when she sees the Dean sitting there with the Head of Oncology, but Chase nudges her with his elbow and sets her beer down on the table. The Dean smiles at her and goes back to her conversation with Wilson. Chase wades in cheerfully.

Cameron sits there and drinks and listens to the music, and Chase was right: the guy at the piano is amazing. He glances over, his gaze disinterested, but the intensity of his eyes crackles through her. She sits up straighter.

"I had fun tonight," she says to Chase by way of goodbye.

"Come back again," he says.

\+ + + +

He kills her. Bhat says it wasn't his fault, but it was. It was Foreman doing the procedure. It was Foreman who poked around too much, wanting to know too much, so that she was stressed enough to bleed out into her brain, a tiny little aneurysm none of them had noticed before. He should have noticed it. He shouldn't have pressed her. He knew she was too weak, but he couldn't let it go.

Marcus is talking in his head. "Hey, brother, gimme five. You kept a stupid spoiled rich white girl from growing up into a stupid spoiled rich white bitch. Lay it on me! Hey, if you want to keep it up, I could hook you up with some guys. They ain't even gonna check your fancy degree or your references. They got excellent benefits, too, keep your high and mighty ass outta the morgue where it's gonna be once those lawyers are done with you. Maybe you can float a little blow on the side, pay off those fat loans. Oh, boy, you got to face facts now. You worse than I ever was. You stole a girl's life away. How's it feel now, top of the class in killin'? I hope you dream about her for a straight year."

By the end of the day, Foreman can't take it anymore. He pulls up his collar against the sleety wind and heads to the dive on the corner. He doesn't like bars; they remind him how close he came to sliding down a dark path. But he needs a drink, and however screwed up his day has been, he's not going to spend the evening slugging back whiskey alone in his apartment. There's a whole new level of pathetic there he's not prepared to face right now. At least in the bar he'll be alone with other failures.

The bar is warm and the air is close. His wool coat is going to reek in the morning, but he doesn't care. He slides up to the bar, demands a double whiskey, knocks it back, and asks hoarsely for another.

"Hey, slow down," says an amused voice next to him. He turns and it's Wilson, head of oncology. Shit, that's the last thing he needs. "I heard about your patient," Wilson says, dropping a friendly hand on his shoulder. "Why don't you come and drink with us?"

Foreman swears inside, but he just grunts and follows Wilson. He nods to the dean but doesn't talk to the others, aching to get drunk. He realizes slowly that the music in the bar isn't a recording; there's some mangy old white guy clattering away. Foreman listens. The music's rough and painful and perfect. A real artist. Foreman wants to ask how a guy with that kind of touch ended up in a place like this. Maybe he knows.

\+ + + +

They all come back. Not all together, not all at once, but there's always two or three seats taken at their table on a Friday night. Sometimes they talk a lot. Sometimes they don't talk at all.

The music rolls over them, twines itself around them, twists itself into their dreams. The notes linger like the smell of cigarette smoke on their skins.

Cuddy hears a kind of sardonic comfort in the old standards. _Screw 'em_, the music says, just a touch of improvisation over the familiar rhythms, a sultry little swagger in the melody. _You know what you want_, she thinks, and the music hums inside her. Now and again the guy - House, she heard someone call him one night - half-sings, a rusty scrape of a voice in which she can't really discern words, but she always feels like he's singing for her. _Don't be an idiot_, he'd say if he actually spoke to her, _you can't always get what you want_. She'll get what she needs, though. She sends another scotch up and he nods, and she realizes she thinks of him as a friend, however outlandish and skewed their non-acquaintance is.

The music makes Wilson feel good, that's all. It touches something inside him that he'd forgotten about. He feels easier afterwards, like the jazz is some kind of dialysis that takes the restlessness out of his blood. The nights he does go home, he picks up his guitar and fiddles with it. Bonnie comes and sits and listens, and he's not sure he cares anymore, but at least it's peaceful. He's thinking about telling her it's over, getting his own place. No point in stringing her along, after all. He can learn to be alone again. When Cuddy's not around, he buys expensive beer for the piano player, dark bottles with labels he can't read. Once he thinks the guy winks at him and he feels like they've shared some kind of joke. He smiles for no reason.

There are tunes that make Chase remember seminary, those few perfect moments in chapel, the times when he was certain he was doing the right thing. The song will spill out through the bar, clear and perfect and sure of itself, and then suddenly the piano player will shift something and there are the moments of doubt, the flaws in the reflection, the crucible melting him down to cheap brass instead of pure, worthy gold. _Lord_, he thinks, _the fact that I want to please you pleases you_. Music is worship the way this guy plays, whatever sort of intercession he's looking for. Chase recognizes that absorption, that sense of vocation. He aches for it sometimes, the certainty. Now he puts his faith in his work, cradling the fragile bodies of the infants, trying to believe they can save them, that it's a matter of faith and of love. He slides a look at Cameron. Her face is pale and lovely in the gloom. She smiles at him suddenly and her eyes glow. Chase remembers the ecstasy of prayer and the swell in his chest during hymns.

Cameron thinks of piano lessons when she was young, abandoned after six months. She never had the patience for it, but now she wishes she'd kept up with it. Something to give her a little more dimension, something to talk about at parties instead of talking about her work ("So can you give me something for my allergies?" over and over). She watches the piano player: the precise curves of his hands, the way his mouth creases at the corners as he plays something really moving, the rasp of his shoe on the floor as he slides his foot to reach the pedals. He's amazing. She wants to sit at his feet and learn from him. She wants the touch of genius she could always recognize and never achieve. Maybe if she touched him, she'd find it. But the piano player turns away from her glances and she lets Chase walk her to her car and thinks about kissing him. He's got the golden boy aura too, the sense of higher calling. And he's charming, with his easy smile and his hands in his pockets. But he waits and so can she.

It isn't the conversation that drags Foreman back to the bar, though it's good to have an in with the Dean. It's the piano player. Foreman's waiting for him to screw up. He listens hard to the music, waiting for a wrong note. The guy can't be right all the time. But it's months before Foreman hears it: one jarring note in the middle of a left-handed improvisation. The guy doesn't hesitate or apologize. He doesn't fumble or falter. He just goes on with the song, rambles through the bridge, and then when the phrase comes around again, he's fixed it. It's like the guy has no regrets. Sure, it's not the same: taking a life and flubbing a line have different consequences, but he has the feeling the piano player would push on through the same way. He'd get it right, without all the guilt and doubt and wallowing. The piano player looks up and his gaze is sharp. It's like he knows. His eyes narrow as if the force of his look could push Foreman out of the bar and back into his life. Foreman lifts his glass to the guy, drains it, drops a few bills on the table, and walks out. Time to get it right.

The piano player goes right on playing, his eyes closed, his head nodding along.


End file.
